Canada to St Mary Lake

We finally Made it to the Canadian Border and headed south.  Due to camp closures from bear activity, difficult logistics and other costly stuff we opted to start at Chief Mountain border crossing instead of entering Canada.  We had a 2 ½ day stretch to St Mary and the end of the permit. Our first day was 20 miles to Poia Lake, and our second was 28 miles to Gunsight lake.

I have no words for how beautiful this park is, and the pictures barely suffice.

Once we reached St Mary thanks to a hitch down the Going to the Sun Road, the ranger told us exactly what we thought they might: there are no walk-up campsites there and no camping permits available to get us back to Two Medicine by trail.  We called a Mountain Chief Taxi (a local hiker shuttle) to see if we could get a ride back to the hostel.  Ronda, the shuttle operator and local Pikuni woman, invited us to camp on her land on the reservation for the night and offered a ride in the morning.  We gratefully accepted and started up the highway after an expensive lunch from the local grocery store.  Tourist town. 

Camp was quiet, peaceful, and accompanied by a reservation dog we dubbed “Pedro” who joined us for dinner by St Mary Lake.  After sitting by the lake at sunset for hours and sharing some dinner with Pedro (he was really hungry), he looked us both directly in the eye, seemingly to say thanks, before walking away into the forest.  We never saw Pedro again.

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